Engagement In Participation TV Plummets
More than 40% of people who had engaged in some form of participation TV in past year have now stopped doing so, with more than 60% either stopping or reducing their participation substantially, according to a new report from Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates.
The value of the market to broadcasters, which was worth up to £400 million at its height, has fallen to around £120 million spent on TV votes, quiz questions and dedicated quiz programmes and channels.
“Until this summer participation TV was the golden goose for free-to-air television networks which had seen their traditional advertising revenue come under pressure from a growth in rival channels and the [personal video recorder] threat to spot advertising,” said the report.
“Commercial network broadcasters will clearly have to look elsewhere for revenue growth in the future.”
The threat to the participation TV market was one of a number of key “battlegrounds” identified in the report, Battling for the Media Consumer, which questioned 2,500 adults in the UK between September 8 and September 18.
Another key battleground it identified was the fight between pay-TV and free TV. The survey predicted a resurgence in the growth of pay-TV, with subscriber numbers set to rise by 5% over the next two years.
It said the long rise of free digital TV, driven by the spectacular success of Freeview, and the relatively slow growth of pay-TV penetration “might be about to reverse, with signs of a definite appetite among Freeview and analogue TV homes for pay-TV services from Sky, cable, BT Vision, Top Up TV and Tiscali”.
It predicted Virgin Media would remain “relatively unharmed” by the withdrawal of Sky’s basic channels such as Sky One, but said the cable company would lose some of its broadband customer base to Sky.
It said the satellite broadcaster would add another 750,000 broadband subscribers over the next 12 months at the expense of Virgin, BT and Carphone Warehouse.
But Oliver & Ohlbaum said Sky’s dominance of the pay-TV sports market would come under further attack from Irish operator Setanta, which it said was making “some promising headway” in the UK pay-TV market.
“It already appears to have two million subscribers with an extra 1.6 million potential subscribers interested,” said the report.
Setanta, which broke Sky’s monopoly of live Premier League football when it paid £392 million for 46 games a season over three years, has around 1.2 million customers on cable, just over 700,000 on Sky, and 100,000 via BT Vision and Top Up TV on Freeview.
It said Setanta had opened up a new market for pay-TV sports, with 45% of its customers not subscribing to Sky.
But its largest potential source of new customers is among viewers who do not currently subscribe to pay-TV. “Setanta, therefore, needs to see a fairly successful expansion of platforms such as BT Vision and Top Up TV if it is to pass the 3 million subscriber mark,” added the report.
Today’s report is Oliver & Ohlbaum’s first annual survey of the UK’s media consumption patterns.
Yesterday Ofcom fined GMTV £2 million for “widespread and systematic deception” in premium-rate phone-in competitions (see GMTV Given £2 Million Fine).